US President Joseph Biden said on Tuesday that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, "obviously" misjudged the situation in Ukraine, and "totally misjudged" the resistance that Russian troops would encounter.
"I think he's a rational person who obviously misjudged the situation very badly," Biden said in CNN interview which released excerpts ahead of the broadcast scheduled for Tuesday at 21:00 p.m. ET (03:00 a.m. ET).
Regarding Putin's speech in February, at the beginning of the aggression against Ukraine, Biden said: "He talked about the whole idea: it was necessary for him to be the leader of Russia who united all Russian-speaking people. I think that's irrational."
Biden also said that Putin mistakenly believed that the Ukrainians would submit to the Russian invasion, which was disproved by their fierce resistance.
"I think his speech, his goals, were not rational. I think he thought that he would be welcomed with open arms, that the home of Mother Russia was in Kiev, and that he would be welcomed there, and I think he simply miscalculated," he said. is Biden about Putin.
On Tuesday, Russia launched new "massive" attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, and the G-7 group of industrialized countries of the world promised at an emergency meeting that they would "call the Russian president to account" for this.
The Russian military has recently suffered a series of setbacks in northeastern, eastern and southern Ukraine.
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